ASUS P5E3 Deluxe: X38 and DDR3 arrives... almost

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe: Board Layout and Features

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ASUS has designed a board that reminds us of cars from yesteryear: large, solid, and seemingly engineered as if it's a tank ready for the front lines. The board easily installs into a variety of cases from Antec and Cooler Master. The majority of connections are easily reached within a full size ATX case. The board features an eight-phase voltage regulator system that contributes to the excellent stability we experienced throughout testing. The P5E3 Deluxe uses 100% Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors. ASUS installs a total of six fan headers (1 x 4-pin, 5 x 3-pin) which is an excellent decision in our opinion. The CPU and four of the five system fan headers can be controlled via the BIOS and the ASUS AI Suite program within Windows.



Around the CPU socket area, we find an ample amount of room for the majority of cooling solutions. We utilize the stock heatsink/fan in our base testing but also verify the ability to install several aftermarket socket 775 cooling solutions such as the Tuniq 120 and Thermalright Ultra-120 during our overclocking tests. The 8-pin EPS12V power connector is located on the edge of the board behind the PS/2 keyboard port and does not interfere with our various cooling units. However, based upon our preliminary overclocking tests, if a vertical mounted fan in an air cooling unit such as the Tuniq 120 or water cooling is utilized then additional cooling will be required on the MCH and PWM areas.


The DIMM module slots' color coordination is correct for dual channel setup based upon the premise of installing DIMMs in the same colored slots for dual-channel operation. The black and orange slot colors (Ed: Happy Halloween?) look out of place on this board, but then again we do not express any love for several board manufacturers who tend to use the entire Crayola color palette on their boards. Installing memory modules will be a slightly difficult affair with a full size video card placed in the first PCI-E x16 slot.
The 24-pin ATX power connector is properly located on the edge of the board along with the floppy drive connector. The CPU fan header is located on the far right edge of the board and works well with our test fans. Two additional fan headers are located on either side of the floppy and power connectors.


The positioning of the six red ICH9R SATA ports is excellent when utilizing the expansion slots. The ICH9R chipset is passively cooled and remained fairly cool to the touch throughout testing... well, at least until we installed our CrossFire setup and then it became quite toasty to the touch. The IDE connector is at a right angle next to the SATA ports and generally is easy to reach in our case. The chassis panel is located on the bottom left edge of the board along with the number three fan header. Right above those two items is a green LED power-on indicator, the battery, and the number four fan header. The two blue connectors are for the additional USB ports and the red connector is for the extra IEEE-1394 connector.


The board comes with three physical PCI-E x16 connectors (2 x16, 1 x8 electrical), two PCI-E x1 connectors, and two PCI 2.2 connectors. The second PCI-E x1 and PCI slots will be blocked by dual slot graphics cards. Several cards we tried in the first PCI-E x1 slot were a very tight fit if a full size card was used in the first PCI slot. Due to the location of the two x16 capable PCI-E slots, there is not much room for custom cooling solutions on the video cards. ASUS has informed us the Republic of Gamers board will have a different layout that will be conducive to custom cooling solutions. We also tried a TriFire setup on this board (three HD 2900 XT cards), but we did not have proper driver support for that to work at present - although we expect it soon.


The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 keyboard port along with several other connectors. The panel also includes dual RJ-45 LAN ports with activity indicator lights, six USB ports, and optical/coaxial S/PDIF out ports. The audio panel consists of six ports that can be configured for 2, 4, 6, and 8-channel audio connections for the ADI 1988B HD codec. The board contains an 802.11n specification WiFi card that worked flawlessly with several different Draft N routers. Finally, there are two eSATA ports along with an IEEE-1394 port which completes a back panel that pretty much covers a wide array of options designed with the home user in mind.


ASUS will utilize the ICS 9LPRS918HKL clock control chipset on this board.